CRM Battle Heats Up as Salesforce Launches Social Media Update

By CIOinsight |
Posted 03-04-2011

Salesforce.com unveiled its Service
Cloud 3 March 3, giving businesses the ability to analyze and respond to
customer feedback filtering from Websites such as Twitter and Facebook. It
represents the next stage in Salesforce's quest to leverage social networking
for the benefit of its cloud-based CRM (customer relationship management) platform, and the latest twist in the company's
competition against not only Oracle, but also SAP and Microsoft.

All of those companies are seeking to profit from
businesses' increased interest in CRM and its ability to not only make their
customer service more efficient, but also blunt the occasional public relations
snafu.

"There is strong corporate awareness, including at corporate
executive levels, of social networks and their potential impact on corporate
brand management and customer service perception," Drew Kraus, a research vice
president at Gartner, wrote in a March 3 research note. "We expect the
high-profile nature of social networks and social CRM for customer service to
rapidly advance adoption from early adopter to mainstream deployments despite
the volatile and rapid evolution of social networks in general."

For the Salesforces, Oracles, Microsofts and SAPs of the
world, that translates into a constant push to add new features and
functionality, giving their respective CRM platforms an edge -- however
temporary -- over their rivals.

Service Cloud 3, for example, lets employees click on a
dashboard tab labeled "Social Conversations" and see whatever customers are
posting on Twitter or Facebook. Those employees can also monitor broader swaths
of social-networking data, via dashboard metrics such as "Twitter Volume by
Product" or "Cases by Channel."